President's Welcome

“... This year, for the first time, we are publishing in advance the abstracts for all the papers and posters which have been selected for the 1996 BAUS Annual Meeting in Edinburgh (Edinburgh Castle pictured lower right). I do hope that you will enjoy and benefit from receiving this abstract book prior to the meeting.

As you know there was a major change this year: abstracts were assessed anonymously and we know this will reassure Members that there has been no bias in selection of the papers or posters. The Programme Committee is only sorry that so many submissions had to be turned down for this meeting.

The new rules for authors means that the standard and format of the abstracts is more complete than in earlier years and indeed requires that the work has already been done, rather than perhaps being completed after hearing that a possibly rather vague abstract has been accepted. We hope that the benefits of this are evident to all.

The published abstract book means that references can be quoted in the literature which we hope will be an added bonus both to the authors and to the British Journal of Urology.

On behalf of the BAUS Members I would like to thank Mr Keith Parsons, Professor John Fitzpatrick. Mr Hugh Whitfield and Mr Bill Hendry for their encouragement and support in achieving the publication of this abstract book and I hope it will set a pattern and standard for BAUS meetings in the future. Our thanks go to Bob Grange and and Cate Foster for their unstinting hard work on this publication ..."

Session Abstracts

Abstracts of individual sessions are available by clicking the appropriate link(s) below: